Aurora Framework Devlog #2

It’s been a while since the last devlog so a lot of things changed on the framework. We changed our repositories to Gitlab and a whole new organization, planned a language port, change the build system, writting a whole new audio library and interface graphics and audio with a native backend with no dependencies.

Why Gitlab ?

Gitlab Logo

Everything is different in a new platform that integrates with almost everything you need to a good workflow development. With Gitlab its possible to have Continuous Integration with Auto DevOps and powerful pipeline system, very complete Issue Board Tracker with Roadmaps and Epics, and other awesome features to manage, plan and monitor the entire project that is not possible with Github.

Gitlab Auto DevOps

Gitlab gave us a 99$ plan to develop free software. Also Github was recently bought by Microsoft, so we immediately mirrored our repositories to Gitlab, thats why we have now the Aurora Free Open Source Software organization.

D as a main programming language

D-Man from Meiz collection

“D shines from low-level control to high-level abstraction”, Infognition

Basically, D programming language is awesome. That’s it. It’s a community driven language, so a lot of improvements are made based on the community interests. We ported our code to D because of the general-purpose and system-level access features which allows us writing high-level and low-level code at the same time, easily.

Contract Programming illustration in D

Garbage collection switch, built-in unit testing, memory safety check, c-like syntax and very complete and well implemented standard library is one of the best features in that language. Check out more here .

A big change in building system!

Meson: software tool for automating building

Building faster is very important for big projects. When we made big changes we thought about this problem: performance and better scripting language for a build system. Using Meson instead of CMake both improve those questions. Configuration time and building time is way faster.

We also worried about the syntax. With meson everything is more clear. As described by meson creators:

The scripting language is cumbersome to work with. Some simple things are more complicated than necessary.

Aurora is now available on Arch User Repository

Arch Linux logo

The Arch User Repository (AUR) is a community-driven repository for Arch Linux users. In order to facilitate our community on installing software, we officially support a package named aurorafw-gitAUR .